A Post-Mortem, a week later

To set up today’s post — which is a tale that is not knowingly false — I divide artificially the broad liberal tent of our age.+ A left leaning primarily republican-shaped liberalism is a warm partisan of democratic self-rule. Its older heroes are Rousseau, Condorcet, and Greene, Hobhouse, and then Dewey before Rawls. This pole increasingly tends toward socialist arrangements for property. The centrist and right leaning liberals, whose heroes are Cobden, Bright, Lippmann, Hayek, Eucken, and Milton Friedman tend to prefer more robust markets. Liberalism has deep roots in philosophy and political economy.

Many left liberals and critical theorists as well as most Marxists tend to accuse centrist and right liberals of lacking warmth for democracy when they do not insist that neoliberalism leads to fascism. And surely it is true that there are right liberals who are enemies of democracy because it leads to redistribution or undermines market functioning. By the same token many right liberals suggest that socialism and planning inevitably leads to (ahh) serfdom, that is, fascism. And some more libertarian liberals think that democracy — institutionalized unwisdom — always leads to immoral political outcomes and so prefer rule by experts or markets.

So much for set up.

The term ‘liberal’ as a political program was probably coined by the Scottish friend of Adam Smith, William Robertson around 1774. It then was used, as Robertson discerned in a letter he wrote to Smith, by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations in a polemical fashion to attack mercantilism.* For Smith, liberalism presupposed, in addition to free trade and free settlement, moral equality, robust defense of property, impartial law, and the genuine possibility for everyone to shape their own lives as they see fit. In fact, Smith coined the term ‘Mercantilism,’ and projected it not implausibly backward onto Locke and the subsequent Whig establishment.

For Smith mercantilism was a political doctrine that promoted national aggrandizement through militarist-imperialist projects that would benefit corporate monopolies manned by politically connected, privileged insiders (a kind of crony, state capitalism). Slavery symbolized the horrors of this system of organized violence. The last few hundred pages of the Wealth of Nations are, thus, a vision for an alternative, liberal political program of reform oriented toward pacific, win-win internationalism. This political program inspired much of what was noble in the works of Bentham, Condorcet, Sophie Grouchy, Kant, Humboldt, Constant, Von Dohm, and the many lesser-known Swedish and Spanish early nineteenth century revolutionaries.

While I strongly hope that the next few years will not be characterized by militarism, it seems inevitable that that the immense state power of the USA will be devoted to promoting tariffs that will support corporate monopolies manned by politically connected, privileged insiders. So, liberalism in its original Smithian sense is highly salient anew. However, Smith never encountered mass democracy, so I don’t want to overplay his importance for my tale. (I use ‘mass democracy’ to refer to electorates that have millions of voters, even if the franchise had non-trivial limitations.)

Now, in France early nineteenth century liberalism was further developed (not the least by Constant) in light of the political dangers of mass democracy, which seemed recurrently to lead to Bonepartism (a form of military dictatorship).** Somebody like Cobden was, thus, rather lukewarm about democracy in light of this possibility. This didn’t mean all nineteenth century liberals were instinctively against mass democracy. Bentham and, especially, John Bright were true liberals and true friends of mass democracy. Bright, especially, was indispensable to the United Kingdom’s embrace of mass democracy. (As an aside, the US did not really have a mass democracy before 1832, and my heresy is that when it did become democratic the US was not especially liberal for much of the 19th century.)

But Centrist and Right liberals never forgot Bonepartism, and they were further scarred by the failure of the February revolution and, subsequently, the implosion of Weimar (and a host of other collapses in the 1930s). Not a few on the right, chose fascism as the lesser evil than actually existing Communism. In my view too many embraced the idea of transitional dictatorship to secure a viable future. But most center/right liberals sought to renew liberalism with a sober understanding of the risks and existential dangers of democratic mass politics that would have been familiar to early nineteenth century liberals.

By contrast, under Pax Americana, leading twentieth century liberals embraced a myth — first propagated by critics of liberalism — that America had always been liberal, and a narrative was traced back to Locke and the wars of religion to give meaning to an American creed centered on a new understanding of the first Amendment. Free speech, relatively unconstrained by considerations of public safety, became the centerpiece of liberal self-understanding alongside fight for civil rights and the march of democratic progress. (Of course, Jim Crow, the electoral college, and the many State laws that regulated speech makes a mockery of this narrative.) Nineteenth century European liberals admired Americans but they all could discern that this constitution had major flaws that might well endanger liberty (and again, the 19th century is not just the age of slavery and Jim Crowe, but also Manifest destiny leading to the mass displacement and genocide of the natives).**

The problem with this narrative is not that it is false — I am too much of a Platonic skeptic about politics to expect public truth — but that it breeds complacency about the nature of mass democracy and the purported stability of America’s constitution. Left critics of that constitution always imagined that pure majoritarianism would be favorable to their program.

Political success (not the least after 1989) reinforced a forward-looking attitude (and embraced by both utilitarianism and Rawlsianism) without much focus on the material and political conditions that make a liberal society possible and without much interest in the actual politics — including the art of government — that would allow for a liberal mass democracy.

Somewhat oddly, the very text that became the symbol of liberalism’s cold war triumph as inevitable — Fukuyama’s The End of History — was itself much more sober on this very point. The essay (recall) clearly discerns the conditions under which fascism may make a revival.

Now, not all Bonapartism is inimical to free markets. And I have friends on the liberal right who take comfort in the defeat of centrist and left of center parties. But anyone that takes a sober look at Trump’s intended appointments will discern that we are entering an age of renewed mercantile-Bonapartism with brazen hostility to the open society. Even though contemporary Trumpism is not much interested in foreign wars (or the military), it is predictable that its proposed tariff policy will generate many international conflicts. It will tempt strongmen elsewhere to impose crony capitalism locally, and this will encourage the use of state power to shape and impose commercial settlements domestically and on international rivals. This dynamic is familiar from late nineteenth century imperialism. What will make it intense even existential in our age is that the asymmetric effects of climate change on food supply and well being will itself be a source of international division.

Many commentators and pundits are treating the defeat of Harris as an opportunity to rejig the Democratic coalition and program, and so do better next time. For them it’s key to develop the right policies to attract the right demographics. Undoubtedly that kind of work needs to be done, especially if free and fair elections remain possible.

I am not so optimistic. For, what they don't seem to recognize is that Bonapartism always and everywhere bribes people to get the job done and aims at destroying any independent powers that may allow (the funding of) organized opposition and critical thought: this is why universities and teachers, physicians (notice what anti-abortion laws normalize), the possibility of a free press, unions, and trade-organizations are always targets. Presumably in our age NGOs, too. This time next year it should be clear where things stand.

Bonapartist-Mercantilist regimes don’t live forever, although they are more resilient than people imagine. And because America is favored by fortune, it can also survive Stateside and even seem to prosper for quite some time while embracing a closed society. How they can be defeated while their opponents are on the backfoot and internally divided is not self-evident. But what gives me faith that liberalism’s defeat is not inevitable is that our age is not the first to be confronted by challenge of entrenched power; and, especially, that over time often Bonapartist-Mercantilist regimes have to make some concessions toward liberal practices and institutions in order to survive, and with them liberal ideas will start to be recovered.

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+Much of what follows is not new to regular readers. But I hope a text not weighed down by citations will be helpful.

*This insight seems to originate in Hayek. And was recovered by Klein and myself more or less simultaneously.

**The debacles shaped American liberalism.